John Doyle Lee (1812-1877) was one of the most controversial figures of early Mormon history. A fervent convert, he was adopted by Brigham Young and rose to become a leading member of the church's hierarchy. Lee left behind a number of colorful diaries that reveal in fascinating clarity and detail the everyday life of Utah's pioneer settlers. In them, he describes his close relationship with Brigham Young, his experiences in converting Native Americans to Mormonism, his trials with farming and livestock, his encounters with his 19 wives, and his eventual exile to the barren wastelands of Lee's Ferry. In the 1950s, five of Lee's diaries in the Huntington collections were meticulously edited and annotated by historians Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks and published in two volumes by the Huntington Library in 1955 to great acclaim as "A Mormon Chronicle", "The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876". The University of Utah Press kept the book in print until the 1990s; it has now been reprinted as a Huntington Library Classic with a new foreword by Andrew Rolle, a Huntington research fellow and retired Cleland Professor of History from Occidental College.
In his foreword, Rolle discusses the collaboration between Cleland, a leading historian of the Southwest, and Brooks, a notable scholar of Mormon history.